GeoMonday 2016.2 – A fresh look at indoor location

TraceWave has developed a new technology for indoor location without any infrastructure. Our radio nodes measure distance and direction between them. This works both indoors and outdoors, with only two nodes but also with multiple nodes. This is a completely new concept, called relative location. If there are more than two nodes, they will work together and create a mesh network. If one or more nodes is fixed and has known coordinates than all nodes can deduce their own coordinates, this is called absolute location. If one or more nodes has GPS coordinates, all nodes can deduce their own GPS coordinates from that, even when they are inside a building. This is called geo-location. So, our technology can provide indoor-GPS functionality. The core of our radio nodes is a low-power 2.4 GHz or 5.8 GHz radio transceiver. Our radio signals are different from WiFi or Bluetooth, because they specifically designed for distance and direction measurement. The radio easily can be implemented as an integrated circuit and will fit in e.g. a watch, bracelet, ID badge or tag. We currently are finalizing our prototype, an FPGA-based software defined radio.

Corné van Puijenbroek is a serial entrepreneur and has 30 years of experience in high-tech wireless development. After working at NXP, Ericsson (DECT) and Lucent/AT&T (WiFi) he was CTO of Adcon in Austria, (ZigBee). In 2005 was co- founder and CTO of GreenPeak, a ZigBee company, acquired in 2016 by Qorvo. Corné also was CTO and VP at several startups, in the area of LTE, solar and low- power wireless. He is (co )author of 13 patents. Corné is co-founder and CEO of TraceWave GmbH.